The global pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in companies' ability to operate under conditions that require specific circumstances—specifically, the need for a plan to allow employees to operate and work remotely.
Preparing for a future beyond this pandemic, employers may find themselves trying to implement positions requiring remote workers in a permanent capacity.
Remote employment gives an employer a whole new set of challenges. With all the new challenges that are coming to light every day, it is incredibly difficult for an employer to develop strategies for an employer to deal with them.
It is challenging to develop a plan for the needs of an employee doing remote work because they are so much different than the typical employee.
The answer to this is to develop an effective pre-boarding strategy. This is the process of reducing the anxieties that a potential new hire may have before officially joining your organization.
It is no easy task to anticipate these worries, though, so here are five strategic moves that will help make sure your perfect remote candidate makes it from interview to job effectively.
1. Take Advantage of Valuable Pre-Boarding Time to Introduce the Team
One of the most crucial factors in a successful pre-boarding process is convincing the employee that your company is the place to work.
For the candidate who is going to be performing remote work, the place where they are going to be doing their work is not a physical place. If they are coming from a traditional workplace, moving to a digital world could be lonely.
Nobody wants to enter an entirely new world full of people they do not know.
This is why pre-boarding is the perfect time to introduce your candidate to the team and allow them to get a sense of the roles within the team to see where they can fit in.
A candidate's anxiety about joining a group of active professionals and contributing to the team can be a significant factor in backing out of a deal.
This is only magnified when they are working remotely and cannot use traditional methods of social interaction to develop their sense of value to the team.
It is vital during pre-boarding to show the candidate that the team is a group of regular people just like them.
It is also essential to not only make the introductions but to make them by using the communication method that your company embraces for their remote employees, which leads me to strategy number two of the pre-boarding process.
2. Introduce the Employee to the Technology your Company Uses
The thought of adopting an entirely new set of applications and technologies on their first day can be a significant source of woe for employees during Onboarding.
Perhaps the candidate is unaccustomed to remote team management software such as Monday.com or Slack.
This is bad during a typical Onboarding process, but for the remote candidate, it can be the crux that leads to a reversal of commitments.
The remote candidate is going to perform tasks and interact with the team entirely through the technology mandated by a company.
They might lack the confidence required to interact with a new team through video conferencing software such as Zoom.
This could lead to apprehension about their approaching start date. Some, if not all, of these technologies and applications, may be entirely new for this candidate, which is a very frustrating experience.
If you, as their employer, can develop a plan to gradually immerse the candidate in this tech in a way that gives them a chance to understand how to use it at their own pace, it can have great advantages.
Giving them a chance to get acclimated gradually during pre-boarding, instead of making the dive into unknown waters on their first day, dramatically reduces anxiety in the hiring process.
Besides, getting them acclimated to powerful tools like Microsoft Teams before their start date gives them a chance to build confidence.
Thus developing knowledge that will create a connection to a sense of accomplishment linked to the company before day one. This can have dramatic results in getting them working on their start date.
3. Put the Correct Information about Your Company in Their Hands
An employee is going to spend a significant portion of their time doing work for your company.
As such, pre-boarding is the perfect opportunity to show them exactly who they are working for and why.
It is the ideal chance to educate the candidate on important company values and principles using an insider vantage point by creating a dialogue with the future candidate.
Pre-boarding software like Beamfox helps automate the entire employee workflow, thereby sharing relevant and up-to-date information as per employee interest and experience.
When the candidate is performing research before their first interview, they can uncover non-controlled content that misconstrues the company's values. This could lead to apprehension as other anxieties build before their first day, causing cold feet.
By providing facts from inside of the company during the pre-boarding process, you can make sure the information they have about your company is accurate and not colored in a negative light.
Giving the new hire precise information about your company can build a sense of pride in the organization they are about to join.
This feeling of satisfaction and reinforcement of company values is extremely important in the remote employee pre-boarding process because, without physical contact with the company, it can become quite easy to disconnect from the offer and ghost on their commitment.
4. Facilitate Some Form of Face-to-Face Meeting Before their Start Date
Working for a company remotely also presents new challenges that an employer must anticipate to get the new employee successfully on boarded.
One key issue that may occur is loneliness as a result of diminished human interaction. This can be especially lethal to the Onboarding process if the new hire is transitioning from a physical to a digital workplace.
As such, it becomes crucial for the new employer to show the potential candidate how they can fulfil their social needs, while also providing them with the job they need during the pre-boarding process.
An excellent way for a company to tackle this challenge would be to set up a lunch outing and invite the new candidate.
This will reinforce the idea that they can make meaningful social interactions with their new team, so they don't have to grapple with the potential loneliness that a remote job will entail.
If a face-to-face lunch is not possible, then it would be beneficial for the employer to find some way of facilitating a social activity between the new-hire and their new team.
The benefits of these two options is they allow an employee to build relationships with their team in a non-professional setting.
For the modern remote worker, these relationships could be the attachment they need to make the final commitment to showing up on their first day.
5. Check-in with Your New Hire
The last strategy cannot be understated enough. While the preceding techniques do a great job of eliminating some of the common anxieties a remote employee would face during the pre-boarding process, it is not exhaustive.
The only way for a company to truly understand what a candidate is worried about is to talk to them.
Checking in regularly with your candidate creates a channel of communication that has the potential to resolve any issues that may lead to indecision.
Without regular communication, the employee may research on their own to try and settle their nerves.
During this research, they may stumble across inaccurate or harmful information that undermines your entire pre-boarding process making it impossible to get that employee in the door.
Establishing yourself as a resource for information allows the employee to come directly to you with any potential problems that are bothering them.
This makes it possible to address the employee's issues in a way that effectively resolves the issue during pre-boarding. This creates a meaningful connection between the new hire and the employer.
Conclusion
A successful pre-boarding strategy involves reducing anxiety so that your future employee goes from interview to job without any hiccups in between.
If the concerns are managed in such a way that the employee has a successful pre-boarding and Onboarding process, the rewards for your company will be plentiful.
Interviewing is only the first step in finding the right people for the right jobs.
Allowing Pre-boarding software to put these strategies and more to work for your business will ensure that at the end of the day, more of the right people find their way into your organisation after acceptance.
After all a company is only as good as the people that it employs!